Health trainer

Health trainers offer practical support to their clients to change their behaviour and achieve their own health goals.

Working life

Health trainers help their clients to assess their lifestyles and wellbeing, set goals for improving their health, agree action-plans, and provide practical support and information that will help people to change their behaviour. This could include promoting the benefits of:

taking regular exercise and eating healthily

reducing alcohol intake

breastfeeding

practising safe sex

stopping smoking

As a health trainer, you’ll be knowledgeable about the health issues that affect the community you are working in.

Working as a health trainer, you could be:

helping people identify how their behaviours may be affecting their health

supporting individuals to create a health plan to help make changes to improve their health

helping individuals to become more knowledgeable about things that can affect their health and wellbeing

signposting to other agencies and professionals

Who will you work with?

As a health trainer, you’ll be knowledgeable about the health issues that affect the community you are working in. The clients that you work with may be identified from existing community and support groups, through referral (such as from a health professional at a children’s centre) or via self-referral. Your clients will often come from hard-to-reach, disadvantaged groups such as the homeless, travellers and those with drug, alcohol and addiction problems.

While much of your work might be on a one-to-one basis, sometimes you could be working with groups of people, for example delivering group sessions on behaviour change and health improvement.

Health trainers may also be assisted in their work by members of the community who have been trained to be health trainer champions (HTCs are usually volunteers who have undertaken health improvement training at level 2 with the Royal Society of Public Health, and who can help health trainer services to extend their reach within communities).

Where will you work?

Health trainers often work for private companies that provide a health trainer service for the NHS or for a local authority. They may also work directly for the NHS, a local authority or a charity, in the prison service or the armed services.

If you're applying for a role either directly in the NHS or in an organisation that provides NHS services, you'll be asked to show how you think the values of the NHS Constitution apply in your everyday work. The same will be true if you are applying for a university course funded by the NHS.

If you’re applying for a job in a local authority, each has its own set of core values underpinning its recruitment exercises, which can usually be found in the recruitment section of its website.

Job titles

Note that terms such as ‘practitioner’, ‘manager’, ‘specialist’ and ‘consultant’ may have different meanings in different job titles. Therefore, they do not necessarily reflect the role category that the job really belongs to. It is important to check the person specification of the role to fully understand the skills and knowledge required.